Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth

Painfully, Leyster stood. “I think my rib is cracked.”

“I think your head is cracked,” Tamara said. “Just what were you trying to prove there? Attacking a tyrannosaur with a shovel! You idiot.”

“I…” Everything felt unreal. “How did you get here? You were running…” He waved a hand toward the copse of thorn trees. “…that way.”

“I turned around. I looked over my shoulder and saw what a stupid thing you were doing, and came back to bail you out.”

Patrick started to laugh. “Oh, man,” he said. “Did you see the look on that thing’s face?”

“When you were beating on it with that—!”

“It was baffled! I thought I was the only one who—”

Then they were all hugging one another and thumping each other on the back, and crying and howling with laughter at the same time. There was a lifetime’s worth of emotion inside them, trying to get out all at once.

“Right through the old antorbital fenestra!” Tamara crowed. “Right there in the middle of the skull where there are no bone plates at all. Nothing but soft tissue. The spear punched right into its brain. Hah! Leyster, you were right—practical anatomy does pay off.” She got out her hunting knife, and knelt down by the tyrannosaur’s corpse.

“What are you doing?” Leyster asked.

“Getting a tooth. I killed this sucker, I want a trophy, damn it!”

Patrick had his camera out. “Stand by the body,” he told her. “Put your foot up on its head. Yeah, like that. Now show us a little cleavage. Ouch! Hey! No!” He laughed and dodged as she jabbed at him with the butt of her spear. “I’m telling ya, a little skin’ll do wonders for your career.”

He posed her again, and ran off several snaps. “Okay, one of those ought to be a keeper. Now all three of us together. Leyster, I want you to hold your shovel with the blade up.”

He began to set up his tripod.

“We’d best take those pictures and get that tooth out fast,” Leyster said. “I don’t want to be anywhere near here when Mama comes looking for her little Baby Bunting.”

Leyster worried about the Lord and Lady all the long and uneventful trek home. Still, when they came trudging up Smoke Hollow, and he saw the firelight from the long house and the last glint of the setting sun on the satellite dish, his spirits lifted. He felt good to be returning to it. He wanted to hear Tamara bragging about her exploits. He wanted to see Lai-tsz again. He wanted to see if she was showing yet. He wanted to share in the happiness he knew everyone would be feeling.

This is my home, he thought. These are my people. They are my tribe.

Terminal City: Telezoic era. Eognotic period. Afrasia epoch. Orogenian age. 50 My C.E.

Poking about in the bluffs of a stream feeding into the Aegean River, Salley found something interesting. In an eroded cliff face, she had noticed a little syncline of a dark material that looked to be asphaltite. So, of course, she scrambled up to check it out. “Dead oil” often marked a bone-bed. She broke off a bit and sniffed it for kerogens. A green streak of corrosion led her to something small embedded in the rock and just recently exposed to the elements. She opened her knife and began to dig it out, so she could identify it.

It was flat and shaped roughly like a disk. She touched it to her tongue. Copper. A penny, perhaps. Maybe a washer of some kind.

For an instant she felt dizzy with how far she was from home.

The stratum, she realized, was metamorphic macadam, a roadbed that had been squeezed and twisted by the millions-years-long collision of Africa into Europe that had thrown up the mighty Mediterranean Mountains dominating the horizon. Once it would have been thronged with tourists in rental cars and busloads of school children, motor scooters and moving vans, flatbed trucks with tiers of bright new automobiles, sports cars driving far too fast, junkers held together with bailing wire spouting black exhaust and carrying families of refugees from regional brushfire wars into a strange new world.

Now it took a sharp eye and careful analysis to determine that human beings had ever existed at all.

Carefully, she wrapped the bit of metal in her handkerchief. She could examine it more closely later. Then she flipped open her notepad to record the find, only to discover to her intense annoyance that her pen was out of ink.

“Dr. Salley!”

She turned to see who was calling.

It was the Irishman. He stood by the stream, waving for her to come down.

She shook her head and pointed beyond him, to where the stream poured into the Aegean. Several platybelodons were splashing and wallowing in the bright green river. They were wonderful beasts, basal proboscideans with great shovel-jaw tusks, and they clearly loved it here. They scooped up and ate the floating waterbushes with enormous gusto. There were little glints of gold about their necks. “Come on up! Enjoy the view!”

With a wry twist of his mouth, he started up-slope.

Involuntarily, Salley touched her torc. She did not trust Jimmy Boyle. He was all calm and calculation. There was always a hint of coldness to his smile.

“Here you are.” Jimmy plopped down alongside her, and waited to hear what she had to say. Jimmy was patient like that. Jimmy always had all the time in the world.

“Shouldn’t you be with Griffin?”

“I could ask the same of you.” He waited. Then, when she did not respond, he said, “He’s concerned about you. We all are.”

“I’m doing fine.”

“Then why aren’t you in Terminal City, helping with negotiations?”

“Because I’m of more use out here.”

“Doing what?”

She shrugged. Down on the river road, a lone Unchanging was guiding a small herd of indricotheres toward their new habitat. Indricotherium was a bland and placid beast, as well as being the largest land mammal ever to exist. It stood fourteen feet high at the shoulder and looked something like a cross between a giraffe, an elephant, and a horse. Salley’s heart soared at the sight of it.

She raised her glasses and stared briefly at the Unchanging, tall and serene, leading the indricotheres.

The Unchanging were beautiful too, in their way. They were thinner than El Greco’s angels, and indistinguishable in their sexlessness. But Salley couldn’t warm to them, the way she could to the beasts of the valley. They were too perfect. They lacked the stench and unpredictability of biological life.

The sun flashed off a gold circlet around one indricothere’s neck, and she put the glasses down.

Again, she touched a hand to her torc.

Jimmy glanced at her shrewdly. “He’s not using the controller, if that’s what’s bothering you,” he said. “That’s just not his style.”

“Don’t talk,” she said, annoyed. “Just listen.”

The first thing that impressed Salley about the Telezoic was how quiet it was. A stunned silence permeated the world, even when the birds were singing and the insects calling to one another across the distances. Something catastrophic had happened to the world within the last few million years. So far as she could tell, all the larger animals were gone. Mammals seemed to be entirely extinct. A thousand noises she was accustomed to were no more.

Except along the Aegean River, of course. Here, the Unchanging had imported great numbers of uintatheres, dinohyuses, giant sloths… a parade of whimsical creatures making up a sort of “greatest hits” selection of the Age of Mammals. With a few unexplained exceptions (such as her beloved platybelodons, which ranged freely up and down the river), the animals each had their own territory, sorted roughly in order of appearance, so that a trip downriver was like a journey through time. Salley had backpacked two days down the river road, past the glyptodons and megatheres of the Pleistocene, the gracile kyptocerases of the Pliocene, the shansitheres of the Miocene, all the way into the Oligocene with its brontopses and indricotheres, before running low on food and turning back.